Best Technology Achievement Awards goes to Stella’s Solar Car

Stella, the first ever solar powered family sized car has made its U.S. debut in September last year. The car took first place in the World Solar Challenge and won the Michelin Cruiser Class for completing a 3,000 kilometer journey from Darwin to Adelaide in Australia.

The Netherlands team that designed the vehicle took Stella for a U.S. tour to help kick off National Drive Electric Week. They recently traveled up Highway 1 from L.A. to San Francisco, and I met up with them in SF to check out Stella.
Stella four-seat, solar-powered car won the World Solar Challenge and is designed to be a functional family vehicle instead of a high-speed racer. Stella’s car uses a roof-mounted solar panel that can provide enough power to move the car 500 miles on a full charge of the battery, which is considerably more than the max mileage of a Tesla Model S. Stella is the product of a team-up between the Eindhoven University of Technology and NXP Semiconductors, and it actually manages to produce twice the energy it consumes through its photovoltaic energy system.

 

Not only was Stella a showcase for clean energy, it was also a means to demonstrate new vehicle-to-vehicle communications systems that could eventually allow cars to work together to determine the best speeds to drive in order to keep traffic moving efficiently.

Runner-up this year was Apple Pay, a very different technological achievement but one that’s no less likely to become truly disruptive. Apple’s mobile payments play debuted this year with a software update released in October for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. It quickly became one of the most-used electronic payment methods on the market, with new financial institutions and retail partners coming on board all the time.